North Korea Blast Wasn't Nuclear, Diplomat Says After Visiting Site

Published: September 18, 2004

Video of the area where North Korea said a huge explosion had occurred last week showed dozens of workers swarming around a construction site resembling a large dam project, while a foreign diplomat who visited the site said Friday that he had found no sign that the blast was nuclear.

South Korea, meanwhile, said a mushroom-shaped plume thought to be from the blast on Sept. 9 was 60 miles away from the site where North Korea said it occurred, and that it may have been a natural cloud formation.

Diplomats from seven countries were flown by the North Korean government to the country's remote northeast, near the border with China, on Thursday to verify claims that the explosion was part of work on a hydroelectric dam.

''One thing is entirely clear: This was not a nuclear explosion that happened at this site,'' Sweden's ambassador to North Korea, Paul Beijer, said by phone from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. ''This is a site where thousands of people are working on dam building.''

Concern arose when South Korea said days after the blast that a mushroom cloud more than two miles wide had been spotted by satellite.

Independent video of the construction site was obtained by Associated Press Television News in Pyongyang, hours after the ambassadors returned from their visit.

The video showed a building complex intact near a place where rock had been blasted away, with scores of workers moving around. A deep excavation with large pools of water and wooden shelters could be seen across the valley, apparently where the dam is intended to rise.

The size of the cloud and the timing of the blast, which coincided with the 56th anniversary of North Korea's founding, fed speculation in the South Korean news media that it was a nuclear test. But a South Korean official, Deputy Unification Minister Lee Bong Jo, said his government concurred with the North's insistence that the blast had not been nuclear.

The incident occurred amid efforts to arrange a new round of six-nation talks on demands for the North to give up nuclear ambitions. The talks involve the Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan.